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With Mark Zuckerberg spending Christmas in Vietnam, the opportunity for some snark about the Facebook founder’s apparently ironic choice of destination was not lost. The U.K.’s Daily Mail promptly proclaimed: “Status update: Mark Zuckerberg goes for a buffalo ride with his girlfriend in Vietnam…where his Facebook site is banned.”
It’s been an exceptionally profitable holiday for Apple and Google, according to research firm Flurry Analytics, which claims that it can detect device sales based on “apps monitoring” and use that to come up with a “roughly 100%” accurate picture of total device activations.
Britain’s government says experts are considering developing a bespoke iPad app that would deliver key data straight to Prime Minister David Cameron’s tablet computer.
Google+ may be considered the ugly duckling of social networks by some, but as Google+ statistician Paul Allen explains, the network is growing at an impressive rate, adding 625,000 new users per day.
In case you’re wondering how to survive between the season finale of The X-Factor and the new season of American Idol — hey, those three weeks can be very hard on some people, okay? — then YouTube is here to rescue you with YouTube Slam, a video throwdown that’ll indulge your need to vote for something meaningless.
Okay, so cash isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, but 2012 looks to be a pivotal year in the transition towards a world where we have options besides just cash and credit.
Cellphone, heal thyself — if you’re sick of having to work your way through a series of broken electronic devices, dulled (or dead) batteries and an endless thread of replacement cellphones, help may be at hand thanks to scientists at the University of Illinois, who are hard at work creating “self-healing electronic circuits.”
Over 9,000 active credit cards, 27,000 phone numbers and 20,000 “easily cracked” passwords — that’s what hacktivist group Anonymous has released to date, after reportedly hacking international intelligence and threat analysis firm Stratfor.
Sure, we’re in the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, with 8.6% unemployment, plummeting home values and Europe on the brink of collapse, but hey, I really wanted an iPhone! That’s the message our country’s youth so bravely tweeted from the confines of their Xbox-equipped, Justin Bieber-adorned bedrooms after Santa Claus didn’t bring them exactly what they wanted this Christmas.
Can anything measure up to what we want to see from Steve Jobs’ last Apple device? We may only be a few months away from an answer, after a new rumor that an Apple-branded television could be released as early as the second or third quarter of 2012.
Forget all those illicit, convoluted hacks that let you kind-of-sort-of put Siri on your iPhone or iPod Touch — how about one that not only works, but does so without violating copyright law?
